Essay: What the Stars Are Really Like

As soon as the film industry invented movie stars, the public caught a
case of chronic curiosity about their off-screen lives. Americans
idolized the images of actors but still never stopped asking: What are
they really like? For years, Hollywood exploited the public curiosity
while making no honest effort to answer that basic question; it was
left to fan magazines to contrive tales that supposedly revealed what
the top players were in private life. But no more. Lately, the
outpouring of tell-all and tell-a-lot books by and about filmdom's
ranking personalities has grown into a torrent.